Driveway for Residential Units

What the bend does before you even reach the garages

Ferns and red-leaved planting fill the mulched bed on the inside of the bend, where this driveway curves past a row of garages before running straight down the side of the block. Small detail, but it does a job: breaking up a long run of hard paving on a site where every household shares the same strip of ground.

Sharing is the whole point of a unit driveway. One house, one crossover, two trips a day. A row of units multiplies that by however many households live along it, and the edges of the drive butt up against garden beds and a shared footpath, with communal lawn along the far side. We built a permeable driveway for residential units here because a single-house design wouldn't hold up to that kind of daily traffic.

Look matters as much as load. White brick, dark cladding, black garage doors and black slatted fencing set the tone for the buildings, so the driveway needed to match rather than stand out. We ran a dark grey Ultracon finish the length of the drive.

The hero photo was shot straight after rain. Beside the driveway, the plain concrete path was still glossy with water sitting on the surface. The driveway had nothing pooling on it at all: the water had already gone down through the surface into the base, rather than running along to whoever's garage happens to sit at the low end. That's a bigger deal on a shared site than at a single house. One resident's puddle becomes the neighbour's doorstep, and a wet surface underfoot is a slip risk for anyone walking out to their car, including neighbours who had nothing to do with it.

Every shared driveway we design starts the same way: work out how residents actually use the site, then build the permeable driveway for residential units around that, and only after that pick a finish to suit the architecture. Homes and layouts differ from site to site, and so does the ground beneath them, so see our driveways page before assuming your job looks like this one.